XRMS – Contact Management Software
Data is money, and probably the most important data you can maintain is your customer list.
In an earlier posting I had mentioned Kurlo which I have been using for several months now. But, I hit a few bugs and it just didn’t have the power that I needed.
Earlier I had looked at Sugar CRM but it was too much and very cumbersome to work with. I also couldn’t figure out how to set up categories for each contact and suspect that that is a feature that is only available in the commercial version.
This weekend I finished an install of XRMS, an Open Source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program located out on SourceForge. Installation only took about 30 minutes, but I’ve been fiddling around for several weeks converting my Kurlo data into the XRMS tables. (XRMS has import templates for most popular software such as Outlook, Act2000, Goldmine, and SalesForce if you already have a customer list in one of those).
I now have the ability to keep track of meetings with all of my students as well as my business network, and clients. Like most CRM packages there are tables to keep track of companies as well as individuals. I can also track Activities, Opportunities, Cases, and Campaigns.
Activities are used to maintain contact with a client and to increase business. For most businesses this would be a follow up sales call. For me it is usually my student advising or the committee work I have set up for the high school Career Expo each May.
Opportunities are sales opportunities. For example, a business may find out that one of their customers will be changing their name in the next few months and will want their entire web site rebuilt. The follow up on this opportunity for that company or individual could be easily tracked using XRMS.
Cases are used to support client issues, like help desk activities and bug reports. A case is set up for an individual contact or a company.
Campaigns are primarily marketing-related. They take the form of direct mailings and similar efforts and are directed towards companies and contacts. Campaigns have a fixed budget and take place over a fixed duration. I might do an email campaign in a few weeks to all the people that have inquired about our program, telling them about the Registration Dates and our new online Orientation.
Right now I am running the program on my laptop but it would be an easy transfer to move it out to one of my web servers so the other faculty members in Computer Careers can access the data. XRMS is PHP/MySQL based so it will run on either a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server or Microsoft’s IIS. I’m using MAMP on my Mac. Or, you could use EasyPHP to set up a local LAMP environment on your Windows machine.
For my convenience, I also added a link on my FireFox favorites bar so the program is just a click away whenever my browser is open.
As part of the open source movement I will be writing a tutorial on how to transfer data from other programs into XRMS.
Follow up (June 8th, 2008)
I have quite using XRMS due to its limitations. I found the table setup to be very bulky and the input very cumbersome. Also, the online community support has virtually died out and it seems that no new development is being put into this application.
I’ve since migrated to address book on my Macintosh. It easily syncs with my iPod Touch. It also keeps track of the groups I need, and is very fast and easy to access. I found that I can also click and drag information from Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook) into Address book. If I need to follow-up on a call I just drag it over to my Mac calendar.
